On Goodness

In an interview at the 92nd street Y, Toni Morrison was asked to talk about “good and evil.” The writer responded, “for years now I have been bored bored bored with evil. It’s just not interesting.” Toni Morrison chose instead to write wrote about goodness, because it was more interesting. She worked to develop characters and stories about goodness, and how it can grow in the life of a person and a community, despite the odds. Goodness was a challenge, in a world accustomed to watching for evil.

Today Jesus tells his listeners, both his own disciples and his religious opponents, that it is not what you eat that contaminates you, rather what comes out of you. Today’s story functions on a number of levels. I need to admit: there is a pretty crass level here. You may have noticed that our editors carefully skipped a number of verses in today’s Gospel. In one of the verses we missed, Jesus tells his followers that what you eat doesn’t enter your heart, it passes through your stomach and lands in the sewer. Even Jesus, apparently, was prone to a good bathroom joke here and there. Our five-year-old would be pleased. He’s all about the potty jokes.

Yes, the Gospel can function on that level, but Jesus’ teaching is inviting his followers not to stay there. To understand this teaching, you have to know that today’s Gospel involves an intramural conflict. This isn’t about the truth of Christianity over and against the falsehood of another religion, no. When you hear about “the Pharisees,” remember Jesus is playing insider baseball, within his own religious framework. Jesus is inviting his fellow believers to go beyond the trappings of outward spiritual practice. Jesus is not questioning the law, per se, but asking the question: is faith just about learning to follow rules? Is that all it is, a set of dos and dont’s?

A few years ago, our neighbor Richard Rohr, was interviewed by an Episcopalian. Brene Brown, a social scientist, has grown famous for her writings on shame and belonging. She spoke with Richard for a podcast, and they talked about the nature of faith. Richard said that the problem with Christianity in this country, the problem with a great deal of religiosity is arrested development. For many of us, our faith got stuck in a childhood framework of right and wrong, of pointing out evil, of following rules.

That is where Jesus’ opponents are functioning today. They see the disciples eating with ritually unclean hands. They notice a group of people not following the rules, and they call them out. In the minds of these experts, faith is following the traditions. And it is about noticing everyone who doesn’t follow the rules, doesn’t conform. Religion for so many has always been about social control.

But it doesn’t have to be. In the middle part of the twentieth century, theories of human development became popular. The Danish Psychologist Erik Erikkson mapped nine stages of growth. The theologian James Fowler created a corresponding six stages of spiritual development as well. For both Erikkson and Fowler, it is in the early stages, those corresponding to childhood and adolescence, where faith is rather black and white. Faith in the early stages is about right and wrong, about naming evil and avoiding it.

Because there are stages of life, when you need some pretty clear lines. Trust me, I live with an almost-six-year-old, I know you’ve got to learn boundaries. There has to be a point when the potty humor is done. We have to get dinner eaten in under two hours. You need some developmental stages with clear rules. You have to build an awareness of social norms. But if you don’t grow past that stage, you miss out on a lot.

In today’s Gospel Jesus essentially invites his followers to grow up. As St. Paul puts it in his first letter to the Corinthians, “when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child…” but as an adult, I put an end to childish things. Jesus today is inviting his followers to go beyond the childish outward framework of faith, to go beyond calling out rule-breakers, to deepen into the heart of spiritual questions.

Jesus invites us to see that within us we hold an immense capacity both for evil and for good. It isn’t as simple as following external rules. Those frameworks can be helpful, but they are just frameworks. Take look at Jesus’ list:

Sexual sin, theft, murder, adultery, greed… Do we avoid these because they are on a list of no-nos? Do we avoid cheating our neighbor because of some external law? Do we know murder is wrong because we have read the New Mexico penal code?

The very nature of law, especially religious law, comes up again and again in early Christian thinking. And a consensus emerges. As the letter of James puts it today, the work of Christian faith is to “welcome the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you.” Faith isn’t just about doing what you ought to do because some external authority told you so. Faith exists in the resonance within your very soul. The good in you responds to the goodness of God. Your capacity to do good is a reflection of God’s goodness to creation. Your ability to love comes from God, whose best name is love. Faith is about tuning in to that which makes our souls sing. Faith is about the deep resonance of good within us, within our neighbors, within the cosmos. We know goodness when we see it, because we were made for goodness.

Still so many Christians treat the Bible as a set of rules. We call things “christian” and “unhristian.” We haven’t grown past the call out culture of the early stages of faith. We hear so much about the Biblical way of living, of raising a family. Lately, we hear a great deal about the Biblical way of being a woman or being a man.

I don’t know what Bible these Christians are reading. Because there are about as many ways of being a man in the Bible as there are depictions of men. If being a man is only supposed to be about asserting power and control, then Jesus probably isn’t your man. Likewise, if your idea of Biblical womanhood is all about being demure and passive, I have a few Old Testament women to whom I would like to introduce you. Jael saved her people by putting a tent stake through the head of their oppressor. Shiphrah and Puah, midwives who made a decision to disobey a man, a leader, rescued the babies of the Hebrew people from pharaoh. Biblical womanhood often looks like defiance.

That is all to say, the Bible isn’t simply a book of rules. It’s more mature than that. One of the best descriptors I have heard for the Bible is this: the Bible isn’t a book of directions (plural). Rather the Bible is a book of direction (singular). The Bible is the Story of God’s loving direction, God’s saving direction, God’s liberating direction. The Bible is a book about how to set people free.

Jesus says today, if we look within ourselves, we will see that we don’t need a whole list of laws to name what wrongs we can commit. If we look within ourselves, we know that we have the capacity for immense evil. We all can imagine ways to hurt our enemies, we all can imagine, probably have imagined, ways to humiliate the people who have offended us. But what if our faith asks us to grow beyond the simple naming of evil? What if we grew our ability to listen to the sound of goodness deep within? The mystic Howard Thurman called it “the sound of the genuine” within you. What if we learned to recognize and cultivate in ourselves and in our neighbors what is true, and loving, and good? Are we mature enough to imagine that kind of faith?

Honestly, I think the jury is still out. In 1976, Jimmy Carter almost lost his bid to be president because he gave an interview to Playboy Magazine. Carter was known to be a God-fearing Baptist from Georgia. It was thought that, even as a democrat, he might carry the South because he was so outwardly Christian. He was running against Gerald Ford, an Episcopalian, and even in the 70s, much of America questioned whether Episcopalians were Christians. But then Jimmy Carter talked about how he “had committed adultery in his heart” to Playboy. For many, Carter had broken a rule. It was beneath the dignity of the presidency to talk about lust in Playboy. Imagine.

Jimmy Carter wanted the country to know he was a Baptist, but he wasn’t some judgmental figure, sure of himself, sure he was always right. He wanted you to know that his faith wasn’t that simplistic. And the judgement that came for his statement, a statement where he quoted Jesus talking about how our hearts matter as much as our actions, nearly cost Carter the presidency. Jimmy Carter was denounced from pulpits across the country. And I’m not sure we’ve improved since the 1976 campaign on this question. Because many Christians, haven’t grown past a faith which is just about rule-following. For many, faith is still about control.

Today Jesus invites us to more.

Toni Morrison said she was “bored bored bored of evil.” She later expanded: “I just think goodness is more interesting. Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately, be good-and that’s complicated.”

What if our faith wasn’t just about avoiding evil? What if our faith invited us to grow up? Following Jesus today, being faithful could be about using our God-given capacity creatively, to commit goodness? Could church be a place where we practice honoring God “not only with our lips, but in our lives?” Surely that kind of faith is more complex. That religion asks more of us. But how much more interesting could our world be if we Christians grew toward goodness?